Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)

the audience applauded

Nice effects though.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

John Wayne fan J.R. (Harvey Keitel) and his friends are local Italian petty ruffians on the streets of New York. He meets and gets engaged to a girl. When she tells him about being raped, he is disbelieving, angry, and heartbroken. With his religious conviction, he can't marry a non-virgin and returns to his old thug life.The actors are all amateurs. This is Martin Scorsese's feature debut. It's a black and white indie. Harvey Keitel is still a student actor. Despite that, one can see the inherit skills of these guys. Scorsese is trying various camera moves. He's an artist playing with his paint. There is a real unpredictable sense of violence and there is his music sense. It's not polished by any means but one can see Scorsese trying something in almost every scene. There are scenes that ramble on but those have a visceral sense of uncertainty. The technical aspect varies and it can feel disjointed especially the dream sequences. The sexual dream comes out of nowhere which doesn't fit the rest of the movie. There is the ambient noise which may be deliberate but probably the byproduct of guerrilla student filmmaking. Keitel is exuding energy as the lead. He's the focus even at such a young age. I do wonder why the female lead has no name. To be fair, most characters do not have names. One would expect JR call her by her name at least once. Is it a continuing Scorsese limitation with female characters? I can only call up one strong female lead in his writing. There are a few more in his other works. It's probably a limitation of simply being a dude. It's hard to write what one doesn't know. Overall, this is a crystal ball that predicts Scorsese's rise as one of the great American directors.

was so intrigued to see one of my fav directors first foray into the media... OK perhaps one turns the sound off, it more closely resembles an artsy home movie... BUT the themes, conflicts, dialogue, anguish, and dilemmas definitely compensate with this overwhelmingly emotional experience... and the MUSIC! had no idea Marty started with that quintessential element so early, and being disappointed because his g/f has no clue about Percy! priceless.... related well to the experience with the b/f rage and the helplessness of being raped, still exists to this day unfortunately... seeing the game of SHOOT being played brought back a lot of memories... so many of the characterizations of Roman Catholic Italian American homelife was well captured... Marty your Mom was absolutely beautiful and am delighted that you have continued to include her in your films, adorable! was most shocked to see such a young Harvey in a sensual role, and the splurge on the revealing dream sequence with that level of passion in a first major film role was jaw dropping... apologies but really quite enjoyed that and guess that makes me a bad girl? lol kudos my dear for your level of entertainment throughout my life... xx oo

This was one of Scorcese's earlier works,, and well i just had a very hard time following this one,, for the most part it was well kinda weird,, some of the music is great like the end by the doors,, the you had this god awful chanting music that was horrible,, Martin what were you thinking,, this movie follows a character named J.R. who falls for this girl,, and well that's about as much as i gather,, story say's she was raped,, they show that scene,, there are very few outside shots,, the movie is in all b/w. which ain't bad,, i guess i'm used to lots of action , gunplay,, something,, although there is a lot of good ole fashioned nudity in here, i just i would call this movie very disjointed at times and that is being kind, this movie took a few years to make,, and now i think i see why.

The promise in crafting an independent feature film in America were richly and passionately exemplified by Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the very first feature directed by great Martin Scorsese. In 1967, whether or not anyone was ready for its individualism, it most certainly declared the onset of an essential new director of great consequence. Without a doubt, Scorsese's ardor-stained debut is at times too stylistically obvious, and it has clear flaws in form, however not a soul who feels real affection for cinema trusts that a perfect one will ever come. What we look forward to in its place are minute rewards of our fulfillment of dreams, love, humor and drama. Scorsese would move on to make Mean Streets, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, GoodFellas, and several other movies that double, triple and demolish the impact this first work, completed with greatly impatient urgency when he was 25, but as with most independent debuts, nearly all of which overstep the bounds of self-indulgence anyway, which has yet to prove a problem for Scorsese, one must be objective with its flaws and not water down its lack of guile. The movies, in their urge to be fashionable, too repeatedly give us a false depiction of corrupt youth and juvenile delinquency and young romance, especially around the time of this film. In Who's That Knocking, Scorsese takes in hand the testosterone overpump of young men on a much more truthful level.Harvey Keitel plays J.R., a classic Italian-American on the streets. When he gets caught up with a resident girl, he fixes on settling down with her, except when he finds out that she was once raped, he cannot come to grips with it. More overtly associated with Catholic guilt than Scorsese's latter pieces, we see what materializes when Keitel's devout guilt complex pulls alongside him.As the movie opens, we cross the threshold into a society of young Italian-Americans in New York's Lower East Side who twiddle their thumbs and hang around and wonder without direction about where the action is. Sometimes they convene at someone's apartment to get drunk, watch Charlie Chan in a dazed state of bemusement and notice one of them who says he knows a couple of girls whom he could call. In this culture, still clearly under a suppressive ethical convention, there are only expected to be two kinds of girls: nice ones and sluts. You try to score with the sluts and you identify the nice girls on an unattainable, romanticized platform.The Harvey Keitel character of Who's That Knocking hails from this world but is not wholeheartedly of it. One day on the Staten Island ferry, he encounters a pleasant, polite blonde girl. They slip into a conversation that ranges John Wayne, reading French, and each other's aspirations. It is an excellently acted scene, a great deal of it shot in one take to keep hold of time as the two survive their awkwardness and agree upon a date.We steadily grasp that they come from dissimilar environments. She is a college student, reads a lot, lives on her own, and doesn't have a TV set. He is hugely nonetheless a part of the neighborhood bunch of hooligans. And then, eventually, when she tells him she isn't a virgin, he is unable to cope with this and he breaks it off. It is a very real concept, a guy not cultivated enough to break from the repressive reigns of his environment even in the face of love.Scorsese has always been skilled at directing delicate scenes, but this early he had certain difficulty with the more conspicuous moments. A scene late in the film, when Keitel goes to a church and kisses a nail on a crucifix and blood drips, is clumsily unnatural. For another absurdly incongruous scene, on the other hand, Scorsese does not merit fault. In order to acquire distribution for his film, he was expected to shoot and slot in a nudie scene to give the film a leg up from the sexploitation approach, therefore he shot a what could I suppose be described as a dream sequence, exhibiting his fantasy encounters with prostitutes. It has the very opposite of anything that could be remotely considered structural function in the movie, save for its acknowledged stylistic competence.Like most Scorsese pictures, this character study which in some sense follows the pattern of John Cassavetes's work, is in effect a director's film. Scorsese has come a long way since, having honed his craft to a point where he is able to engross his audience in a story without hiding, and the go-for-broke energy of his style is actually what makes his films so ceaselessly enthralling.